vovat | In Space, No One Can Hear You Clamp (Reply)

The Silence of the Clamps - I liked this one. I remember a discussion somewhere (on the old alt.tv.futurama newsgroup, I think) about why Clamps works despite the fact that he's basically a one-joke character. The answer that made sense to me was that he works as a parody of gimmicky characters, in that he's constantly pointing out his gimmick. So it was cool to see a larger role for Clamps, and the misdirection with the farmhand who looked just like Bender was clever. Strange that Billy West looked just like a bending unit, but wasn't one. I guess the Crushinator married him at least because of his resemblance to Bender. The show has a lot of jokes about robots being related to other sorts of machines, but we never really learn exactly how reproduction works for them. Bender apparently considers the robot arm that constructed him to be his mother, but what of his father who was killed by a can opener? A deleted scene in "The Series Has Landed" had the Crushinator say she was pregnant with Bender's child, and Bender gives a different child of his to the Robot Devil in The Beast with a Billion Backs. We'll probably never know exactly how this works, or even sort of how it works.

I don't have much else to say, so I'm just going to talk about dreams I've had recently. One of them last week involved going on some sort of school field trip, which included a long bus ride. The ride was really boring, and no one else there liked me or wanted to interact with me. From what I remember, that was most of the dream. There was also part where we ended up stuck in some town where the bus had broken down. I think

bethje was with me for this part of the dream, and we also stopped by a burger place where

3x1minus1 was working. When they sent in a new bus, it was really big and fancy, and included a dining room with tables. Robin Goldwasser was sitting at one of them, and singing along with one of the songs from They Might Be Giants' children's albums.

In another dream with a similar theme, I was back at my old college dorm, attending a graduation ceremony because I hadn't back when I actually finished college. (In real life, I graduated on time, and attended the interminable ceremony for the Honors College.) I saw people I knew, but none of them would talk to me. (Notice a pattern here?) For some reason I was staying in my old dorm room and had a bunch of stuff there, which I was trying to figure out how to get home. Back when I was really in college, I didn't drive, so one of my parents had to show up to help me transport my things back home. Also, as with other dreams where I was back in the dorm, people could come and go freely from my room, which was rather unsettling. Also, somebody showed me a plant that a kitten had somehow gotten into. Then there was some assembly that involved Nazi Germany, and outside the auditorium was a vending machine in which two girls somehow got trapped. And in another dream, or perhaps another part of the same dream, I was driving Beth home from somewhere and lost my way, and ended up going into several schools for no real reason. There was something about a new Weird Al EP coming out next year, and they were previewing the tracks at a music store. In the dream, I recognized the songs he was parodying, but I don't think they were anything real. Several cartoon characters showed up in some capacity or other, including Charlie Brown, the Looney Tunes, and the Flintstones. And I was on a plane that did a nosedive and came out all right. Originally I was just hearing about this plane, but then I was somehow on it. I can't remember what happened in my dream the night after that, but I remember there was a real sense of urgency to it, as if something important was coming to an end. I guess a lot of my dreams are like that. Endings are a recurring theme for my subconscious.

I have a Google+ account now, but I don't know what to do with it other than add people I know from elsewhere. Gotta catch 'em all, right? Actually, I can see it being a useful venue for things I want to tell everyone I know on the Internet (i.e., not just LiveJournal friends), but would rather not see made public. I can't think of anything like that at the moment, though.